Paula Ben-Gurion (née Munweis; 1892–1968) was the spouse of the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion. Born in the Russian Empire, she migrated to the United States at a young age. There she trained as a surgical nurse and became an anarchist. She married Ben-Gurion, despite their disagreements on Zionism, and followed him to settle in Palestine. She dedicated her life to caring for her husband and raising their three children. During the 1930s, she attended the World Zionist Congress in Switzerland. Following the Israeli Declaration of Independence, her husband became the country's first prime minister and Paula served as his spouse. She subsequently became a prominent public figure in Israeli society, communicating with the press and attending public events. She also cared for her husband and managed their household in Tel Aviv, judging who would be permitted to see him and how long meetings would go on for. They retired to the Sde Boker kibbutz in the Negev Desert, where they were buried alongside each other.
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Early life
Pauline Munweis was born in the Belarusian city of Minsk, in the Russian Empire, in 1892. She migrated to the United States in 1904, settled in New York City and learned the English language. There Munweis trained as a nurse, specialising in surgical nursing, at the Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey.
Munweis mostly associated with other first-generation Jewish immigrants. She was known to be friendly, although she also had a reputation for being outspoken and blunt in conversation. She was an anarchist and an anti-Zionist, and was deeply inspired by the Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman. She felt at home in the United States and considered herself American; she did not understand the Zionists' desire to move to Palestine. She would remain opposed to Zionism throughout her entire life, preferring to dedicate herself to other causes.
Munweis lived and worked in the house of a Jewish doctor, who had opened his New York home to activists of the Labor Zionist political party Poale Zion. There she met the activist David Ben-Gurion, who had moved to the United States following the outbreak of World War I. Ben-Gurion had difficulty with personal relationships, but was attracted both by Munweis' warmth and unreserved style. In the summer of 1916, she volunteered to help Ben-Gurion write his book, The Land of Israel Past and Present, by copying passages from books at the New York Public Library. They began a romantic relationship while working together and soon grew to love each other. Munweis said of Ben-Gurion that, "as soon as he opened his mouth–I felt he was a great man".
Marriage to David Ben-Gurion
On 5 December 1917, Munweis and Ben-Gurion married each other in a civil ceremony at the New York City Hall. This surprised Ben-Gurion's fellow activists, who did not even know he and Munweis were in a relationship. They refused to seek sanctification for their marriage from a rabbi, despite repeated pleas by religious officials throughout their life together. Understanding that they did not share each others' views on Zionism, Ben-Gurion had warned her that, if they married, she would have to move with him to Palestine, which at the time was a poor country without modern public utilities. He also told her that he planned to enlist in the nascent Jewish Legion and fight in the Palestine campaign against the Ottoman Empire. She decided to marry him anyway, hoping she would be able to dissuade him from going to Palestine and signing up to the Legion. Munweis took her husband's surname, Ben-Gurion. She also began using Paula as her first name, going by what her husband called her. Before long, she had given up her career as a nurse to commit to married life. She left the Beth Israel hospital, two months before she was due to graduate with her diploma, despite pleas from her friends. According to Israeli historian Anita Shapira, "she made him her life's work". Shapira wrote that Paula was not an intellectual or emotional partner for Ben-Gurion, and instead dedicated herself to caring for him. She introduced him to personal hygiene practices such as regularly bathing, brushing his teeth and even changing his underwear, which he had previously been unaccustomed to.
In April 1918, after only five months of marriage, Ben-Gurion informed Paula that he had enlisted in the Legion and was about to be deployed to Palestine. Paula, having just found out that she was pregnant, broke down in tears; she would have to give birth and raise their child alone. She tried to convince him not to leave, but he responded that he believed his cause was "greater and more sacred than anything in the world", including her. Left alone while waiting for their first child, she became severely depressed. In his letters to her from the front, he took responsibility for having left her and reaffirmed his love for her, but continued to justify his actions, believing that his Zionist ideals would eventually bring them "divine happiness" and "uninhibited love". He wrote to her that, if he had not enlisted, then he believed he would have been "unworthy of you bearing my child". On 11 September 1918, Paula gave birth to their daughter; following her husband's wishes, she named her Geula (the Hebrew word for "Redemption"). She wrote that their baby was pretty, despite resembling her father.
Spouse of the prime minister
On 14 May 1948, Paula witnessed her husband declaiming the Declaration of Israeli Independence at the Tel Aviv Museum, which resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel. David Ben-Gurion became the first prime minister of Israel, with Paula serving as the spouse of the prime minister from 1948 to 1953. From this point onward, she and her husband sent each other less correspondence; Elizabeth Monroe supposed that they were likely spending more of their time together. In an interview with Mira Avrech, published in Yedioth Ahronoth, Paula spoke at length about her husband's personal and political life, giving anecdotes of his daily routine and habits, as well as the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence. As spouse of the prime minister during her husband's first term, her outfits were designed by her friend Lola Beer Ebner, who also designed outfits for First Lady Vera Weizmann and other women in Israeli high society. Paula's presence at fashion shows, at a time of economic crisis when basic necessities were being rationed, drew criticism from journalists and the wider public.
She continued taking care of her husband by ensuring he ate, slept and dressed well. She frequently turned away people visiting her husband, including people she thought might exhaust him and those who she did not like. In biographies about her husband, Paula has frequently been depicted as an "angry gatekeeper" who "bark[ed]" at visitors, and contrasted with descriptions of her husband's warmth. She once interrupted a meeting to bring her husband a drink. When Isaiah Berlin met the Ben-Gurions in Tel Aviv in 1950, he recalled Paula rejecting her husband's offer to serve their guest a coffee or an orange juice, saying "water would be much easier"; Berlin accepted the water. She would openly confront her husband whenever she thought he was wrong about something. At a speech her husband gave at Lod Airport, when he complained that many young Jews did not go on aliyah and only donated their money, Paula interjected "that's important too, isn't it?"
On 7 December 1953, Ben-Gurion resigned as prime minister, and the following week, he and Paula moved to Sde Boker, a kibbutz in the Negev desert. He had not considered her wishes when he made the decision for them to settle in the desert. She was forced to leave behind a full life in Tel Aviv, and was not happy with the move to a kibbutz in the desert, where she would live an ascetic lifestyle alongside people who were much younger than herself. She nevertheless oversaw the design of their new cottage, which would have a large study and separate bedrooms, and enforced strict standards of hygiene in her home as well as in the collective kitchen. She did not like the taste of the food served by the kibbutz kitchen and insisted that her husband eat her own "kutch-mutch" – a bland but healthy meal – twice a day.
Death and legacy
Paula Ben-Gurion died in the Beer Sheba Hospital on 29 January 1968, at 76 years old. At her deathbed, her husband read the verse "thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown" (Jeremiah 2:2). He subsequently retired from politics and public life. David Ben-Gurion had never discussed with Paula where she would have liked her body to be buried. He decided that her body would be buried on a cliff next to the Midreshet Sde Boker, in a small plot surrounded by trees, which he had intended for his own body. She received a simple funeral at Sde Boker, where it was attended by family and members of the Israeli government, and conducted by the chief military rabbi Shlomo Goren. She was given a eulogy by Devora Netzer, who described Paula as the prime minister's "helpmate". The site of her burial was renovated extensively, building a ceremonial plaza over her own grave and moving her gravestone away from her actual resting place.
Paula's husband was left feeling lonely after her death and fell into a deep depression. He lived alone in their house and continued eating her "kutch-mutch" to honour her memory. He also spoke very little to other people in the kibbutz, keeping mostly to his small circle of bodyguards and his secretary. He wrote that, after Paula's death, his only remaining close friends were Shlomo Zemach and Rachel Beit-Halakhmi. David Ben-Gurion died on 3 December 1973, in Paula's former bedroom in their home in Tel Aviv. His body was buried alongside Paula's. Per a request in his will, no eulogies were given to him at the couple's gravesite. In contrast to Paula's funeral, a modest event where mourning and emotions had been freely expressed, his own funeral was carried out as an unemotional state affair. Their burial place has since become a secular pilgrimage site.
The Ben-Gurion home in Tel Aviv was turned into a museum, in which David Ben-Gurion was centred as the protagonist of the exhibition, while Paula was relegated to a secondary role. Her own bedroom was covered in photographs of her husband. Architect Arieh Sharon designed a dining hall for a kibbutz in the Negev desert, which he named after Paula, but it was never constructed. A school in Jerusalem, named after Paula Ben-Gurion, was established to provide education to both secular and orthodox Jewish students; its attempt at integration quickly collapsed, with orthodox parents insisting their children be segregated from the secular students. On the 50th anniversary of Paula's death, in January 2018, a conference was held at the Ben-Gurion museum to commemorate her; all the presentations were given by men, and they were followed by a general discussion about the spouses of famous men. During the April 2019 Israeli legislative election, Sara Netanyahu complained that the Israeli press "gave more credit to Paula Ben Gurion than to her".
